butterfly in nine laps : shiori
by Luc Court
Summary: Nine standalone stories in patchwork order, nine characters of the Utena movie. POVs in a world where you can be dead while alive and living while dead. References to the series, manga, and movie. Spoilers. SQUICK.


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butterfly in nine laps : shiori

Court: Don't ask. Utena movie spoilers. **SQUICK.**

Butterfly in Nine Laps was originally a nine-part Utena movie fic meant to be read in any order. Because of FF.net's stricter guidelines, not all sections can be posted here, so only the finished non-explicit parts have made it up. And yes, Shiori's section is less explicit than some of the rest.

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Shiori was the only one he knew of who perfumed her pubic hair; lilac, inevitably, which was a blessing. Touga did not know if he could have stood roses from her as well, though with Anthy the scent permeated every inch of her like an aura that you could catch just between the musk, like leaves around the real flower. Occasionally Shiori joked that she would shave the hair into the pattern of a heart--it would start low, the tail would go long, so that when she spread her legs the figure would be nearly bisected. 

Afterwards he could not look at the romance cards the younger students passed back and forth giggling to each other with; he kept thinking of that redness splitting open with the scissoring of Shiori's thighs and how easily his mind attributed teeth to that hungry mouth. Eventually Touga stopped closing his eyes during sex. Fangs played dominant hallucinations whenever his lids closed and he was still inside her, flesh moving in double-time like a movie spliced subliminal. Images flickered that lingered for days. Touga was never certain if they had happened at all. 

He was lucky that she never realized the reason for his aversion. During those times of vision, Shiori would always blame his shudders on her virtue rather than her vice.

Shiori could not resist comparisons--waist, teeth and nails, of her hair to that of the Rose Bride's. Touga grew wearing of watching her flaunt her ass to him from every angle imaginable, demanding praise. He'd taken up photography out of desperation to sate her, borrowing a camera from Akio and clipping snapshots until there'd been an altar of her pasted up on the ceiling with a backdrop of whitewash. It had been about then that Shiori had decided that she enjoyed toying at the missionary position so she could stare at her own nipples while Touga grit his teeth and tried not to let his eyes close until he at least came first.

That wasn't the end of her obsessive urge to be championed. Shiori would tease about how purple was the truer color of a rose by defending the idea of clotted and thickened blood, which to Touga revealed more that she knew not enough of that substance but still did not care. 

Not even menstrual accepted Shiori. One afternoon he'd come back to find stains smeared all over the bed and the petite witch-bitch sitting in the middle, prim and proper, and the color had still been red, red, _red_ no matter how much she had gloated over him and wiped her hands on his cheeks.

The smell of it lingered like a death wound. Touga had become so used to his own stark neutrality, the _lifelessness_ of his own self, that to stink of anything else only reminded him of decay.

Anthy only ever smelled of flowers.

Shiori detested roses for their resistance to the assumption of purple rather than their natural bent to the rich reds that suited Himemiya. She would tuck in petals the color of shadowed amethyst teasingly among the folds of her labia when she could find them and crow her triumph over the spectrum itself. 

Privately Touga thought this made her look diseased, but he knew she didn't care.

Becoming the Rose Bride meant more to her than what she would have to carve the role into for it to take her. The title was all that was important. Warping it was only a natural step to force it into submission to her. To her, a witch _was_ a whore at heart while dressed in the rags of a queen; to Shiori, the trappings of the magic could grant whoever held them the true fit, much like a corset cinching flesh into perfectly idealized curves. 

In her desperation, Shiori shaped her familiar with the colors pulled from the first man she could claim as Prince instead of just bedfodder, a ruddy mockery with an oversized mouth to symbolize its preference for talking, just as Anthy's mouse-monkey beast had large enough ears to fly high in a stiff wind. The dream of Shiori's creature kept her company the nights when she would go out with candles and watch the moths flock to her hand.

By her expression, she was enchanted by the powdered wings as they were drawn, the flame irresistible despite the rote-spoken warnings that attractiveness would burn. The comparison of her fascination with them was so obvious that it was painfully tawdry. Touga liked to pawn off his attendance by claiming that he disliked nights that weren't so hot to be sweltering. 

In reality, it was so he wouldn't have to look at her.

Sometimes Shiori would turn back and see him watching her from the archway with the empty candelabra in his hand, and her eyes would sparkle in delight far more perverse upon her features than any moan in bed.

He was mentioning this to Akio as they had spent the day in the halls draped in dropcloths to keep the furniture underneath from dust. There were always more floors in the Academy than the school knew what to do with, and few students had the keys or will or both to access the empty rooms. 

Our own private Necropolis, Akio had teased to him with a flash of his teeth, and Touga had replied with a soft, _complete with a rotting queen_. The other man had drawn back then, the frown across his dusky features sign that he had taken this to mean his sister; in the summer-hazed seconds afterwards, Touga could not recall if that had been his actual intent or not.

Touga had picked up extra film. That had been his excuse to errand.

They had parted soon afterwards at the entrance to Shiori's preferred rooms, Akio giving him that sidelong look he had that said, _I know you are still working as a rival, and it suits me for you to be reminded_. Both of them had duties to attend to once night fell, and Touga had no illusions that whatever strange rituals Anthy demanded of her Prince could be any easier than Shiori had in store for him.

"I'm back," he announced once he stepped inside, and closed the door shut behind him with a click like a gun being cocked.

The object eternally purple was lounged upon his writing desk. Shiori had grown tired of penning her cheap spells while sitting in a chair traditionally, so she had moved to sprawl across the top; with his entrance, she craned her head up and then smiled.

Touga glanced away. One hand waggled the camera as a distraction. It worked, which was depressing, but no less useful.

Bubbled laughter falsified for maximum effect was Shiori's reaction. The papers were tossed on the desk along with the feather quill, which caught air resistance and swept itself away from the tragedy of poetry scripted in Shiori's bubbled penmanship. It fluttered to the ground. Shiori's feet met it with a miniscule crunch when she shoved herself off the desk to land.

"A _camera._ Did I ever _tell_ you, Touga," Shiori purred as she paced away from the ruins of literature, tucking her thumbs into the waistband of her skirt and sliding them towards the front closures, "that photographs are more real than reality itself? A picture can last for years. But real life," and here she sighed, all drama and hollow sincerity, "eventually _dies._"

Cloth whispering was Touga's sign to avert his eyes, but not to close them. Not unless he wanted to envision jaws opening wide in the blackness to swallow him, pale legs opening to feast.

With a metal rumble, he heard the zipper of her skirt undone.

"Of course it does," he claimed despite the falsehood subscribed, his voice as smooth as cream being poured into a bath. The act of walking was one that occupied him as far as the bed, and then he negated the hint of what might happen next by stooping to reach beneath it. Searching under the bed brought to his hand a tripod entangled with some of Shiori's underwear--something horrendously lace-encrusted from when she'd had the fetish of dressing six years younger. Doing so hadn't bestowed her missing virginity, but he'd played along until she'd grown tired of it.

A twist of his hand exposed the tripod out to clean air and unhooked the lingerie in the same motion. "Let's take more pictures." _Let's lie a little more, _he meant to say, but the intended person he would say such things to is busy licking the insides of Anthy's wrists right about now. "You like that, don't you, Shiori?" he urges, already popping open the back of the camera and patiently threading in the new spool of film.

"I _like_ real things," Shiori sighed again, and her voice was already faking arousal despite how they both know better. Touga didn't look to see what she was doing with her own hands prematurely.

"If that's the case, I wonder why you tolerate this game at all."

"_What_ was that?" Purple waspishness in three simple words; Anthy never was so easily bated, even when Touga shouted rather than muttered under his breath.

"Nothing, Shiroi. Ready?" The camera's lever latched into place, Touga knelt. The prop of the tripod was a steady shield between him and her. Rather than be caught on film in any position other than provocative, Shiori's teeth closed shut with a click and she spread her arms wide.

Touga placed his eye to the lens. Open.


End file.
